Topics - chrisbirkinshaw

I'm not offering a solution to this, but just interested to know if anyone has thought about it.

Basically Restart TV/Catch-up TV is where you can click any event in the past 7 days from the EPG viewer and start watching that event. This includes the current event. Events available for Restart are normally flagged in the EPG viewer with a special icon.

The recordings would need to be hidden from the normal Videos section of LMCE. They would also need to be available from the EPG viewer in mythtv/vdr which could be a big change.

What I might do is write something which schedules VDR to record channels constantly and then have these given a special tag so you can sort them easily from your normal recordings, but this is not a very polished solution.

It would also be great to be able to select one of the events available for Restart and "record" that event to your normal recording storage.

Here is a script you can run on your apple mac. It gets the idle time, so your workstation light is kept on when you are working but turned off when you go away. I'm working on a few more scripts which I will tidy up and put into the Wiki a little later. I'm working on one to control your AV equipment when you are listening to music in iTunes.

Note you must add your Macs public RSA key (ssh-keygen -t rsa) to the LMCE /root/.ssh/authorized_keys for this to work, which may be considered to be a security hole, depending on how secure your mac is. It would be better to get MessageSend running on the Mac but I couldn't manage it.

I setup an event and command socket to DCE and register for message interceptors - all good so far. I can directly message my device as many times as I like, but when it receives an intercepted message the core seems to expect some response, and closes my connection when I don't give it any. What is the solution for this?

So I've started to try and program a DCE device to do some automated lighting logic in Ruby. My idea is that you add the device, tell it which room it's in, and then it uses security sensors in that room and knowledge about the watching media state etc to control the lights. You should also be able to specify a delay period for the counter, after which period of no movement your lights are turned off.

I know you can register for commands from child devices, but how do I register for commands from non-child devices and run some ruby code when this happens? As a first test I want to create something which looks for certain commands being executed and then does something in response.

I am having problems connecting my AVR-2807 via RS232, so I hooked it up to a laptop and tried with Hyperterminal. Has anyone else done this? I can't get any response. I found the following info on AVS forum:

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RS232 To start with, I could NOT get the RS232 to work, despite me being an experienced comms type person. Eventually, reading between the lines in the manual I worked out. Here is the recipe (please don't ask me for support on basic PC stuff like Windows, Hyperterminal etc - you'll find that elsewhere)- You need the RS232 Protocol manual from the USA Denon site (not available in my home country - the UK)- Connect a laptop with a straight RS232 cable- Use Hyperterminal at 9600,n,8,1 and NO flow control (that's important)- Type the word PWSTANDBY and one linefeed into a Notepad document, copy this into the Clipboard (this must be in upper case)- Now turn on the Denon with the Standby button, and while it is starting up use Edit, Copy clipboard to host in Hyperterminal- If it has worked, the Denon will turn off.

Thereafter, you can control the Denon via RS232. Prior to that, it is deaf and dumb (at least - mine was). My conclusion was that you have to zap it with the command in a short space of time after going from Standby to On. If you try to type the command in to Hyperterminal, you can't get it in fast enough to be recognised.

1. Check in devices tree that device for the Disk Drive is set to /dev/hdc2. Check using dmesg | grep hdc that the DVD drive is present3. Look in /var/log/pluto/26_Disk_Drive.log and see the following:

Error: couldn't open /dev/hda.

Funnily enough, if I move the IDE cable so that the disk is /dev/hda, then I get an error in the Disk Drive log saying /dev/hdc can't be opened!

I must be doing something really stupid here. Can anyone suggest what?

Can anyone recommend a USB webcam for use as a security device, which is easily available (e.g. eBay)? There are no suggestions on the wiki from what I can see. It would need to have some method of mounting to a wall etc.

I was thinking it would be useful to have a grid of lighting scenarios as an option for the default screen of some orbiters. For example I have an orbiter in my hallway which is assigned to a dummy room called "Automation" which has about 20 lighting scenarios attached, but it is annoying that I only get the top line and have to press More to view the rest.

As suggested elsewhere I have dedicated a Room to automation scenarios. However, you can only get a few on the top line in the lighting category, and it would be nice to fill more of the page. Is there any way to achieve something which looks like the view you get when you click More, but as a default view for the room? Or any other solution to this problem?

If anyone wants to buy this for it's low power consumption don't bother! I've done some testing and found that at idle the board uses 45 watts, compared to 55 watts for my dual core AMD X2 3000 processor.

I want to create a wiki page of cool things you can do with home automation respond to events and scenarios. Right now my fear is that you can't really, but I'm hoping some people have come up with some cool stuff.

If sensor "Wall Switch 1" is tripped, then set device "Table Lamp 3" to 50% brightness.

The reason I did this using Misterhouse to fire the initial event is that I found it much quicker than if I just setup the switch as an X10 security sensor in LMCE directly. It also enables me to add some cool logic so I can do motion based automatic lighting with timers and geographical position based day/night logic which I can't do in LMCE. I will detail all this in the wiki.

Please tell me what you have managed so I can generate a decent list of things you can achieve with LMCE home automation!